>here, sennett and cobb take issue with a purist marxist notion of class and
>power as the either/or of propertied v. propertyless. it is not so much that
>marx was wrong, but that weber and gramsci showed how power became legitimated
>and operated in other ways. authority makes people obey w/o recourse to
>brutal violence. the power of capital becomes obscured as power actually
>asserts itself in much less obvious, more insidious ways: badges of ability
>legitimate power through the authority of science--the natural and social
>sciences, medicine, education, managerial science, psychology and
>psychoanalysis, social work--all of which maintain power by establishing a
>monopoly on knowledge--what counts as knowledge, who knows, who can know, and
>why. as sennett and cobb write: "an authority judges freedom and dignity ."
Kelley, the new common sense today seems to be that the inherent *ability* to possess those immaterial assets of "knowledge and practice of ways and means" (Veblen) that are themselves an objective, albeit ideal, cultural inheritance priviliges one even in relation to the owners of the means of production. Geoff Hodgson argues for example (make of this what you will): "...in so far as the physical means of production have become less important, the questio nof who owns them has become less consequential...the relative baragaining power of the skilled employee has increased, nad the gap in this respect, between the skilled and unskilled worker has widened substantially. These differences are manifest in growing differences in income, and the sever shortages of skilled labour in many industrialised countries [sic], compared with widespread mass unmployment of unskilled labour. The skilled worker carries knowledge as a significant tool, signifying possession of an important but immaterial part of the means of production. It also means that the emphasis made by Marx and his followers on the de facto separation of the worker from ownership of any of the 'means of prouduction' has to be modified. As knowledge intensive skills become more prominent, then more and more workers will be in possession of a valuable set of conceptual, analytical, administrative and other skills. The term proletarian--referring literally to those that possess nothing but their children--has become even more of an exaggeration. The mental means of production have become much more important, in both relative and absolute terms. Under capitalism, those personal skills may be hired but not owned by others. Of course this does mean the abolition of divisions between social classes, nor necessarily a reduciton in material inequality. Today the skilled worker carries valuable, inalienable, accumulated knowledge, even if they are relatively deprived in terms of income, wealth, control and power." Economics and Utopia. 196-7
Charles Murray is of course much more sanguine about an alliance of the able and the propertied against the unskilled, composed disproportionately of inferior racial subpopulations. Yours, Rakesh